Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Too Much of a Good Thing
Snowfall, Upper Cascade Fall, Yosemite
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 G
2.5 seconds
F/11
ISO 100
Greetings from Iceland! And no, despite appearances to the contrary, this image is not Iceland (or even Snowland), it’s Yosemite. (Actually, if you know Iceland, the “not Iceland” giveaway would be all the trees.)
People ask me all the time, what’s the best season to be in Yosemite? While I honestly can’t pick a “best” Yosemite season, I can say that each season in Yosemite offers its own set of good things that distinguish it from the other seasons. Even my least favorite season—yes, I can give you a least favorite Yosemite season—has many good things that I feel fortunate to have witnessed.
My least favorite is easy: summer. Summer is when the crowds swarm every square inch of Yosemite Valley, the waterfalls and meadows dry up, and the sky is chronically blank. But summer is also the only time Yosemite’s high country—Tuolumne Meadows, Olmsted Point, Glacier Point, Sentinel Dome, Taft Point, and the breathtaking High Sierra backcountry—is easily accessible.
While spring is when the tourists start returning to the park after their winter hiatus, it has enough booming waterfalls, fresh green meadows, reflective vernal pools, and ubiquitous dogwood blooms to make the increasing crowds (more than) tolerable. Spring is the Yosemite of postcards and calendar pictures, and probably the best season for first-timers.
In autumn, the now depleted snowpack has completely dried, or at least slowed to a trickle, Yosemite’s heralded waterfalls. But that diminished flow means the low and slow Merced River splits the length of Yosemite Valley like a twisting, reflective ribbon. Adding to these reflections a surprising abundance and variety of fall reds and golds elevates autumn to my personal favorite Yosemite season for creative photography.
That brings me to Yosemite’s most variable of seasons: winter. Come to Yosemite during a dry winter and you’ll find lots of dirt, bare deciduous trees, dry meadows, and unimpressive to nonexistent waterfalls. On the other hand, with the exception of the last couple of weeks in February, Yosemite in winter is refreshingly serene—and even late February’s Horsetail Fall mayhem doesn’t compare to the summer swarms. And even at its worst, winter reflections are quite nice, and it’s still Yosemite (El Capitan, Half Dome, et al haven’t gone anywhere), so I’ll take even the driest Yosemite winter without people over the nicest summer day.
But a Yosemite winter at its best is a sight to behold. Winter is Yosemite’s wet season, making it the best season for capturing a clearing storm. Most of the precipitation in Yosemite Valley falls as rain, but if you’re fortunate enough for your Yosemite visit to coincide with a cold storm that smothers Yosemite Valley in white, you’ll see it at its hands-down most beautiful. And while you may find yourself sharing this beauty with other ecstatic photographers, even the slightest threat of inclement weather seems to repel virtually all tourists.
Falling snow does introduce a host of difficulties that include: limited to impossible access to certain locations, treacherous driving, the potential for chain requirements (usually limited to vehicles without 4WD/AWD), and clouds temporarily shrouding Yosemite’s soaring monoliths and waterfalls. Not to mention the difficulties inherent to photographing in snowy conditions. But if you can overcome these hardships, the payoff is worth it.
The thing is, to witness Yosemite’s fresh-snow majesty, you need to be present among the falling flakes, no matter how cold the temperature or poor the photography. That’s because swirling clouds of a clearing storm vanish so quickly, and the trees start shedding their white coats almost the instant the sun comes out—if you wait until you hear it snowed in Yosemite Valley before rushing to the park, you’re too late. In fact, even if you’re actually present in the park and simply retreat to the shelter of your hotel room or a valley restaurant until the clearing starts, you risk missing some or all of the best stuff.
Living less than four hours from Yosemite Valley, monitoring the Yosemite forecast gives me enough advance notice to get to the park while the snow is still falling. In other words, it’s not by accident that my galleries are filled with so many Yosemite snow images.
But sometimes I just get lucky. Scheduling workshops a year or more in advance means no clue what the conditions will be—the best I can do is try to maximize the chances for something. Horsetail Fall happens in mid to late February, but all the tumblers clicking into place is never guaranteed. Similarly, while I know February is one of the most likely months for snow in Yosemite Valley, no snow is always more likely—but that doesn’t keep me from wishing. (As much as I hope for ideal Horsetail Fall conditions for my workshop—lots of water in the fall and unobstructed sunlight at sunset—I’ll take snow any day.)
This year’s Yosemite Horsetail Fall workshop, which wrapped up just a week before I departed for Iceland, fulfilled those snow dreams many times over. How much snow did we get? Look at the picture above, and consider that it came on our first day, at our second photo location, and that at least two more feet above what you see here fell before the workshop finished.
The compactness of Yosemite Valley, combined with lifetime of Yosemite visits, enables me to adjust my plans on the fly in rapidly changing conditions. On that first afternoon, with a moderate snow falling in the valley I expected poor visibility, so my original plan was to start at Bridalveil Creek, where we could photograph nearby scenes. But when I saw that Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan were still visible despite the falling snow, I headed straight to Valley View.
We enjoyed about 30 minutes of quality photography there before the ceiling dropped and erased everything more than a few hundred yards away. I quickly collected the troops and we beelined up Big Oak Flat Road to Upper Cascade Fall, which I was confident would provide the best combination of photogenic scene that was close enough to still be visible.
I was actually a little surprised to find the top segment of this multitiered waterfall (upper left corner of the image) slightly obscured by the falling snow—fortunately it was visible enough to still be worth photographing. Our biggest challenge turned out to be a strong breeze blowing snow straight down the mountainside and directly onto the front element of any lens trained on the scene.
Normally I shield my camera with an umbrella in rain and snow, but the wind made using an umbrella problematic, so I switched to Plan B and pulled out the large microfiber cloth that lives in my camera bag. While composing, metering, and focusing, I just ignored the snowflakes accumulating on the front of my lens. When everything was ready, I wiped the lens clean, then draped the cloth over it while waiting for my 2-second timer to count down (have I mentioned lately how much I hate Sony’s cable and Bluetooth remotes?), whipping the cloth away at the latest possible instant before the shutter clicked. I continued this way through a series of compositions, until I was confident I’d captured something worthy of processing.
Turns out, this was just the first of many spectacular shoots my group enjoyed. As the workshop continued and we handled every single discomfort and inconvenience the storms served up, all while watching the photography just keep getting better and better, I became more and more convinced that there was no such thing as too much snow in Yosemite, and just kept hoping for more. And more, and more, and more…
On the afternoon before our final day, just as I started believing nothing could go wrong, the National Park Service said, “That’s enough,” and closed the park. I was stunned, and for some reason recalled the time my college baseball team, while on a roadtrip to a distant city, was gorging at an “all you can eat” buffet—until the manager came out and informed us, “That’s all you can eat.”
Even though we were shut out of the park for the workshop’s final day, we still gathered for one last image review on that final day. Based on the images shared, and the excitement everyone had with all of their captures, no one was too disappointed. It was almost as if we all felt that, given what we’d seen so far, to expecting more might just be a little greedy.
I couldn’t agree more. And honestly, despite missing a day and not having access to every location, I have to say this turned out to be one of the most photographically successful workshops in my 20 years leading photo workshops.
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Yosemite Snow
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 
Gary, that workshop was EPIC! Thank you for putting us at the best possible spots at the best time. So glad I was with someone who knows the park so well. This guy from Florida thought the snow scenes were out of this world. ~ Mike Riffle